Networking

This section is in beta. See the note on the cheat sheet.

The network adapter (DEV9/SMAP hardware) is IOP-side, like the other peripherals. The SDK has two mutually exclusive architectures for using it.

Architecture A: TCP/IP on the EE

• dev9 (core) - the driver for the DEV9 expansion bay hardware the network adapter plugs into.
• smap (core, built in NETMAN mode) - the Ethernet PHY/MAC driver, IOP-side.
• netman (core) - an IOP-side network interface manager module that smap reports link status through, with an EE-side RPC client of the same name.
• ps2ip (core) - the TCP/IP stack (lwIP), running on the EE. Sockets, DHCP and DNS are EE-side code. netman and smap move raw frames on and off the wire.

To use it, embed dev9, netman and smap, and link ps2ip and netman on the EE. Load the IOP modules, bring up DHCP with ps2ip_setconfig(), then use socket(), connect(), send() and recv() from EE code.

POSIX aliases

ps2ip's lwipopts.h disables the close, read and write POSIX aliases (LWIP_POSIX_SOCKETS_IO_NAMES is off). Close a socket with lwip_close(). A bare close() does not compile. The aliases are disabled because those generic names would otherwise shadow file I/O elsewhere in the program.

Architecture B: the whole stack on the IOP

• smap-ps2ip (core) - the same SMAP driver source as smap, built in a different mode (SMAP_PS2IP=1 instead of SMAP_NETMAN). It talks to an IOP-resident lwIP stack directly instead of going through netman.
• ps2ip-nm (core) - a package separate from the EE-side ps2ip: the IOP-resident build of the same lwIP source. Nothing runs on the EE. Sockets, DHCP and the whole stack live on the IOP.
• IOP modules that need network access without the EE build on this. http (a read-only HTTP client filesystem driver that registers an http: device) is the example in this SDK.

The two architectures cannot run at the same time. smap and smap-ps2ip both use the same NIC, so a program uses one or the other.

The EE has no RPC path for bringing up DHCP in this architecture, as netman provides for architecture A. The equivalent of ps2ip_setconfig() must run on the IOP alongside the stack.

Selection

Requirement	Architecture
Sockets from EE code	A
Self-contained IOP module with network access and no EE involvement	B

See also

• EE, IOP, and SIF - the RPC pattern that netman's EE/IOP split follows
• Controllers and Storage - other EE-client and IOP-driver pairs